Generally, in the large scale production of bakery goods, production processes are optimized to decrease the process times, increase productivity, increase of operating speeds, and reduce production costs. To such ends, the study of large scale baking processes allows for the evaluation and optimization of each stage of the production process. Consequently, utilization of the equipment used in the production processes may also be optimized.
According to the design and implementation of some production lines, the production process may be limited by the capacity of a piece of equipment therein. For example, a piece of molding equipment may be operating at a constant level and may be connected by conveyors to another piece of equipment, such as an oven. However, the molding equipment may have a production capacity below the production capacity of the oven. Thus, the amount of product transported directly from the molding equipment or via intermediate operations is less than the production capacity of the oven. Therefore, the production process is limited by the amount of production capacity of the molding equipment. The same may happen with other equipment in other stages of other processes, such as in the case of a wrapping machine, etc.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to have a bakery product grouping system dividing the bakery production process in several intermediate stages to permit grouping of the product to increase production numbers in order to utilize maximum use of the equipment's capacity.